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James Burch, ARB, RIBA, Senior Lecturer
in Architecture and Planning
as a field of relationships between the objective
social conditions that constrain the drawing
Studio and the habitus with which students
negotiate those conditions.
In seeking to
understand this learning culture of drawing we
can then develop a clearer sense of the
character of contemporary architecture drawing
as a conduit for architectural culture and what
this learning culture might tell us about the
continued relevance, if there is any, of teaching
students to draw.
The University of The West of England,
Bristol
Drawing as an Instrument of Architectural
Culture
THE UNSTABLE
CURRENCY OF
ARCHITECTURAL
DRAWING
Introduction
It is tempting and provocatively simple to make a
metaphoric parallel between the critical condition
of our society’s financial instruments and the
status of architectural drawing.
To borrow
i
Marx’s phrase and apply it to these different
forms of currency: ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
We use increasingly suspect currencies with an
exchange value destablised by the open-source
and de-professionalising nature of information
technology and we find the connection between
physical matter and its representation becoming
ever more tenuous until eventually - in our drawn
and financial currencies - we are left bankrupt.
For the teacher of architectural design this raises
the question of how architectural drawing should
be taught and to what end. Arguably drawing
has been the universal currency of modern
architectural culture and an education in this
culture will be fundamentally incomplete without
a thorough understanding of the history,
conventions and practice of architectural
drawing. But the digital modeling of buildings is
undermining the traditional place of drawing as a
design tool; and the model of ‘design proposition
communicated by representation’ is being
usurped by a method that replaces the
intermediary role of drawing with the offer of a
digitally simulated form of built reality. In this
environment the learning and teaching of
architectural drawing would seem to be
increasingly problematic – an enquiry that looks
to develop cultural capital in a drawn currency
that remains socially valorised but which is under
reconstruction by the impetus from industry and
academia towards digital technology. This paper
seeks to understand this question by analysing
ii
the ‘culture of learning’ architectural drawing
iii
where, after Pierre Bourdieu, this is conceived
Before exploring this culture of learning we
should first understand the nature of
architectural drawing and its privileged place as
the principal instrument by which architectural
culture has traditionally been made and
regulated. Here we might argue that drawing
has performed three instrumental functions – as
the creative generator of intellectual order, as
the medium of translation for architectural
artefacts, and as the instrument by which the
cultural system of architectural production is
controlled.
The traditional practice of architectural drawing,
as a manual craft communicated in a language
of conventional two and three dimensional
iv
projections - incorporates a deeper definition of
architectural drawing as essential to the
formulation of architectural ideas. In Sir Peter
Cook’s words this is the role of drawing as the:
v
‘the motive force of architecture’.
Another
distinguished academic of the same generation,
Simon Unwin, reinforces this argument by
defining architectural drawing not as the
production of artefacts but as a process of:
… manual-intellectual activity. […] the
knowledge
and
understanding
‘inhabiting’ the performative interchange
that is underway while a mind is engaged
vi
in drawing.
In both these quotations we can see drawing as
an instrument of intellectual investigation
essential for the translation of ideas into
architectural form.
Each statement also
encapsulates a key aspect of professional
architectural culture that drawing has valorised
over the twentieth century. Cook’s phrase, and
the book for which it provides the title, places
drawing as central to the development of
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twentieth century architecture as an avant-garde
practice where the process of drawing makes
‘paper-architecture’ of architectural value in its
own right.
While Unwin looks to define
embodied architectural knowledge, understood
through the practice of drawing and expressed in
drawing, as the architect’s principal – and
somewhat magical – currency during the
twentieth century.
Both views would also
support Robin Evan’s seminal analysis of
“[d]rawing’s hegemony over the architectural
object” as creator of artistic subject-matter that
vii
“will exist after the drawing, not before it”.
Originally published in 1986, Evans’ essay
Translations from Drawing to Building was
perhaps written at the culmination of drawing’s
traditionally instrumental role in the creation of
architectural culture. Writing 25 years later, and
in some respects in reaction to digital design
methods, Marco Frascari defends drawing as
instrumental in the creation of architectural
meaning and perhaps, in his definition of the
hand drawn ‘fattura’, a ‘facture’ with the auratic
power to influence the making of buildings. Here
he argues more explicitly that architecture and
drawing are indivisible. For him: “Architecture is
not a work of art, but the art that makes the
viii
work” and this architectural art is hand-drawn.
Frascari also links drawing explicitly to the
formulation of the habitus by which architecture
is practiced.
In his reading of Bourdieu’s
Postface to Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and
ix
Scholasticism
Frascari stresses Bourdieu’s
analysis of drawing as the development of a
regulated
and
transposable
disposition
x
developed through practice.
By extension,
through Bourdieu, it is one step further to
position drawing as social instrument by which
the translation into architectural culture occurs.
Architectural Drawing as Late Twentieth
Cultural Currency
Applying Bourdieu’s mapping of the ‘field of
xi
cultural production’ in The Rules of Art, Helena
xii
Webster
makes clear the position of
architecture as a contemporary cultural system.
The architectural profession has developed an
autonomous field of cultural power that
substantiates itself with its own internal market
for symbolic goods and within this professional
field fractional groups of ‘distinction’ coalesce
around poles of economic and cultural capital.
One can understand the currency of drawings as
a central expression of these groupings. Within
the fractional field of small-scale, restricted
production the RIBA President’s Medals publish
xiii
‘‘art for art’s sake’ or production for producers’’
that are high in cultural but low in initial
economic capital, but with high symbolic value
holding the promise of future financial reward.
Whereas the fractional field of large-scale
production meets the immediate needs of the
external market with high short-term profit of little
symbolic value – here one thinks of the
computer-generated view verifiable for purposes
of planning submission.
Thus both these
fractions of the field of architectural culture are
expressed in distinct approaches to drawing and
one can read the ongoing revolution in
computer-aided design as playing out the
creation of these distinct fractional fields.
Bourdieu’s study of the social impact of an
earlier visual technology - mid-1960s French
xiv
camera clubs
experimenting with a newly
accessible
technology
showed
how
‘photographic practices were a ‘register’ of social
xv
position’ . In this development of distinction the
game of pure aesthetics is played by those with
more cultural, economic and social capital while
a resource-bound aesthetic is pursued by those
xvi
with less symbolic capital . If we substitute
digital design practices for Bourdieu’s camera
clubs one might see parametricism as the pure
expression social distinction and BIMM as its
resource-bound relation.
The architectural drawing as artefact can
therefore be seen as an expression of social
distinction within the cultural field of architecture
and practices of drawing are driven by the forms
of capital accumulated within this field. But it is
in the learning of it that drawing becomes the
social instrument by which the translation into
architectural culture is affected. There is nothing
more mysterious within Reyner Banham’s Black
xvii
Box of architectural education
than the
learning of drawing and as we have seen from
xviii
xix
Garry Stevens’
and Helena Webster’s
‘Bourdivin’ analyses the development of the
architecture student is a physical embodiment of
the cultures and attitudes of the architectural
profession. It is clear that Unwin’s ‘manualintellectual activity’ of drawing must be central to
this process of physical embodiment and it is
also clear that acts of symbolic violence are
enacted to reinforce this process – the public
burning of student drawings for example, or the
enactment by a tutor of self-induced wretching
when viewing a first year’s first attempted
xx
drawing .
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So, how do students negotiate this treacherous
cultural field?
The Culture of Learning Drawing
Building on Bourdieu, Hodkinson, Biesta and
xxi
James’ theorise a learning culture as a space
formed at the inter-leaving of a number of related
fields, where boundaries of the learning culture
do not encompass the boundaries of its
constituent cultural fields and where the fields
themselves are changeable over time, both by
their very nature and due to the possibility of
external intervention. In the learning culture of
architectural drawing we can identify these interleaved
objective
fields
as
the
institutional/professional
field
and
the
institutional/academic – these two playing out
issues of symbolic value we have discussed
above – these are joined by a financially-driven
field of professional practice, itself influenced by
globalizing and governmental fields. And as this
is a field relationship – a force field if you will the introduction of students’ subjective agency,
their habitus, revises this field making the culture
of learning drawing a shifting interplay of
objective and social conditions. The student of
architectural drawing is an active agent in this
culture of learning; their habitus is formed by the
social system of architectural culture, forms the
culture and is the viewpoint from which the future
cultural meaning of architecture is proposed. If
then, as argued above, architectural drawing can
been seen as indivisible from architectural
culture, but architectural drawing is now an
increasingly unstable currency undermined by
digital simulation, what does the culture of
learning drawing tell us about the contemporary
field of architectural production?
In answering this question the culture of learning
computer assisted drawing is central. As a full
anthropological survey has not been carried out
on this question, at this point in time the author
can only offer his own observations of the
student habitus as it negotiates the learning
culture of architecture drawing.
Firstly this
habitus is negotiating an institutional field that is
fractioned into an employment market valuing
CAD (and soon BIMM) practice as a means of
enhancing economic value and a professional
body torn between the protection of its cultural
capital and the fulfillment of practice’s
requirements that architectural schools train
CAD/BIMM literate prospective employees.
Meanwhile in academia Evan’s hegemony of the
drawing has fragmented. Scholarly responses to
this range from the re-assertion of the ‘critical
xxii
creativity’ of the hand-drawn
and the
xxiii
continued need for hand drawing in practice
xxiv
to assertions of the digital tectonic . One is
tempted to categorise the literature around this
topic as a chronological reaction to the
increasing prevalence of ‘CAD’. In the early to
mid-1990s, academic papers that tentatively
investigate the introduction of CAD to schools of
architecture; a millennial group that questions
the qualitative effects CAD has on design
teaching; and contemporary scholarship that is
polarised for and against the digital, now with a
new strand that tentatively investigate the
introduction of BIMM to schools of architecture.
Influencing all these fields is the globalising
effect of the network society where generic
geographically-specific labour is replaced by
high-skilled self-programmable labour nonxxv
specific to place. As Brown and Lauder have
shown this places a further objective pressure on
this field as students realise they compete for
this form of specialized work within a global
market.
And each student habitus negotiates this field
with its own accumulation of economic, social
and cultural capital. Some already embody the
‘architect-habitus’ - in the author’s own fictitious
analogy:
The successful architect’s son seeks advice
from his father’s office on the most
appropriate rendering package for his
student-work and a new ‘Mac’ is bought
through the Practice’s books ready for the
boy’s next university assignment.
The gendering of this analogy is intended and
here, put crudely, the boy with the biggest
machine and the social wherewithal to exploit it
gets the best degree – and the job that
financially rewards this accumulation of symbolic
capital. At another extreme, students reject
digital production and seek distinction through
many architectural schools’ ‘livre du jour’ Juhani
Pallasmaa’s The Thinking Hand: existential and
xxvi
embodied wisdom in architecture . The title
suffix of which seemingly acknowledges a
search for a traditional form cultural capital
protected from the destablised currencies that
architects now deal in.
Conclusion:
Instrument?
Drawing
as
a
Pedagogic
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From this first glance the culture of learning
drawing seems to be trading in a currency that
no longer seems to fully recognise its own value.
Exchange rates are faulty, with a range of
student habitus assigning differing symbolic
values to various qualities of architectural
drawing and with these values contested by
different forms of drawn praxes. How then might
we act as teachers in this learning culture? A
first step might be to parallel Helena Webster’s
explanation of Bourdieu’s relevance, that, for
architects and teachers of drawing we act
‘reflexively’ recognising our position within a
xxvii
system of cultural production . A second step
may then be to shift one’s approach to the
teaching of drawing from an approach that
employs drawing as the principal instrument by
which architectural culture is made and
regulated to an approach where drawing is
introduced as the tool with which aspects of
architectural pedagogy are explored – always
mindful that in architecture drawing is always
more than that, one might say dangerously so.
i
Through Marshall Berman, 1983. “All That is
Solid Melts into Air:
the experience of
modernity”. London: Verso.
ii
James, D. and Biesta, G., (ed.) “Improving
Learning Cultures in Further Education”.
London: Routledge.
the
architect's
imagination”.
Routledge, pp. 10-11.
London:
ix
In Bruce Holsinger, 2005.
“Appendix II:
Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture
and Scholasticism – Pierre Bourdieu”. From The
Premodern Condition: medievalism and the
making of theory.
Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 221-242.
x
Marco Frascari, op. cit., pp. 40-41.
xi
Pierre Bourdieu, 1996. “The Rules of Art:
genesis and structure of the literary field”,
translated by Susan Emanuel.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
xii
Helena Webster, 2011.
“Bourdieu for
Architects”. London: Routledge, pp. 95-100.
xiii
Ibid, p. 97.
xiv
Pierre Bourdieu, 1989, “Photography: a
middle-brow art”, translated by S. Whiteside.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
xv
Helena Webster, op cit., p. 40.
xvi
Ibid.
xvii
Reyner Banham, 1990. “A Black Box: the
secret profession of architecture”. In Reyner
Banham, 1996.
A Critic Writes.
Berkeley:
University of California Press.
iii
Pierre Bourdieu, 1971. “Intellectual Field and
Creative Project”. Social Science Information
(8)2, p. 89-119.
iv
The conventions of plan, section, elevation,
sciagraphy, axonometric, perspective, etc. that
I teach to first year students.
v
Peter Cook, 2008. “Drawing: the motive force
of architecture”. Chichester: Wiley.
vi
Simon Unwin, 2007. “Analysing Architecture
through Drawing”.
Building Research &
Information 35(1), p. 102.
vii
Robin Evans, 1996.
“Translations from
Drawing to Building”. From Translations from
Drawing to Building and other essays. London:
Architectural Association, p. 165.
viii
Marco Frascari, 2011. “Eleven Exercises in
the Art of Architectural Drawing: slow food for
xviii
Garry Stevens, 1995.
“Struggle in the
Studio: a Bourdivin look at architectural
pedagogy”. Journal of Architectural Education
49(2), p. 105-122.
xix
Helena Webster, 2005. “The Architectural
Review: ritual, acculturation and reproduction in
architectural education”. Arts and Humanities
in Higher Education 4(3), pp. 265-282.
xx
Recent anecdotal evidence.
xxi
Hodkinson, P., Biesta, G. and James, D.,
2007. “Learning Cultures and a Cultural Theory
of Learning”. In James, D. and Biesta, G., op
cit., pp. 25-28.
xxii
Deanna Petherbridge, 2002. “ Subverting the
silicon: a critique of drawing in the computer
age”. UME 14, p. 5.
xxiii
in
Brian Edwards, 2005. “The Use of Drawing
Architectural
Design:
some
recent
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experiences from UK practice”. Architectural
Research Quarterly 9(3/4), pp. 273-286.
xxiv
Neil Leach, David Turnbull
Williams,
2004.
“Digital
Chichester: Wiley.
and Chris
Tectonics”.
xxv
Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder, 1996.
“Education,
Globalization
and
Economic
Development”.
Journal of Education Policy
11(1), p. 1-25.
xxvi
Juhani Pallasmaa, 2009.
“The Thinking
Hand: existential and embodied wisdom in
architecture”. Chichester: Wiley.
xxvii
Helena Webster, op cit., p. 107.